We're all locals everywhere now
Everything is the same everywhere nowadays, and maybe that's not a bad thing
Happy Sunday,
And just like that, we’re in December, the holiday season is in full swing, and life transforms into a double marathon of finishing up all the work stuff due by year-end, and showing your face at all the Xmas parties that matter.
Last Sunday I took a hiatus with this newsletter, as Ellie and I were spending a week in France and Switzerland, taking a combined birthday and Xmas holiday break ahead of all the craziness that’s due in December. For both of us, the last weeks of the year are bound to be very busy with work and social engagements, and our days are planned back-to-back all the way till December 22.
France was absolutely fantastic; it was so good to be back. It’s quite miraculous given how much we travel, that we haven’t been back to Paris, or anywhere in France together for that matter, since Ellie moved out of the Paris 18eme apartment she rented for two years in 2010-2012. I spent two days in Nice in the summer of 2016 on my own, mentoring at the European Innovation Academy, but other than that, neither of us set foot in France in all those years.
This time around we spent our days visiting Xmas markets in Paris and the Alsace, enjoying a weekend in Basel with our friend Andreas, and reliving our Paris life from 12 years ago in the very apartment that we once lived in, on the 20th floor of the iconic Boucry tower, overlooking all of Paris from a bird’s-eye view.
One big takeaway that stood out for me on this trip is how completely commoditized all the countries and cities have become. I’ve been experiencing Paris for almost 30 years, and when comparing my first ever visit with my parents in 1995 with last week’s trip, it’s incredible how much smaller the differences are between home and abroad.
Back in the summer of 1995, France was still effectively outside of NATO, the euro was still seven years away, most of the cars on the roads were French, and the majority of those French cars still had the particular yellow headlights that have been standardized away in favor of the European white lights since. I remember how we had to wait in a line of cars on the border between Kortrijk and Lille (Schengen was only implemented three months earlier, and France was delaying the removal of border checkpoints due to the ongoing multiple bombings in the Paris metro that summer). I also remember how in the supermarket, all the products were different from back home in the Netherlands, and how it was a constant effort to calculate prices from French francs to Dutch guldens. And of course, absolutely nobody spoke English.
How different everything is today. You land at CDG airport, whizz through the automatic passport control gate with your EU id, open up Uber, and a a few minutes later you’re headed towards the city on the back seat of a hybrid Toyota SUV, chatting with the driver in English. Prices are in euros, everything is paid by tapping your phone, most of the eateries you see are burger joints and everybody is clad in Zara and H&M. Or in Louis Vuitton, which might be local, but is as common in any other city in Europe. I actually looked it up, and in 1995, Louis Vuitton had only one store in Paris, obviously its flagship one. Today there are 12. And of course, everybody’s wearing AirPods, listening to Spotify, and there’s a Starbucks on every corner.
On a positive note, this is all a huge testament to technology, to European integration, to globalization, and to how far we’ve come. But I can’t help thinking, as I often do, of how much more difficult things have become for the younger generation. Thirty years ago, all you had to do if you wanted to experience new things, was to drive south for five hours. It was a completely different world. Just going there meant you’d learn the basics of a new language, taste new flavors, and in a fundamental way for your life experience skills, see that things could be done differently. Today it is much harder to do that.
As Ellie and I strolled along Champs-Élysées one day last week, I also thought about something else. Big cities have completed the cycle of turning into tourist traps. The iconic Paris boulevard is no longer a place where a youthful Joe Dassin would stumble upon a fellow young Parisian and fall in love at first sight, as he did in the song. The romance of the Eiffel Tower is only in photos, and only if you’re visiting from outside Paris. Living in a big global city means being competed away by tens of millions of annual visitors, who all want a piece of your street, your food, your museum, and your shopping. As time goes by, all those things become made for them, not for you. Adding to that, modern technology allows you to do anything from anywhere. You don’t actually have to live in Paris to have a great Paris-based job, and hundreds of thousands of people with those jobs don’t live there anymore.
And maybe that’s the very reason Ellie and I hadn’t been back for 11 years. Maybe big cities are places where you’re more local when you’re visiting, not when you live there. As the well-known New York saying goes, “a New Yorker is anyone who feels they’re a New Yorker”. Maybe we’re all Parisians, Londoners, Tokyoites, and New Yorkers, much more than the people who actually reside there.
What a time to be alive! See you next Sunday!